This Week in Fiction: Frances Hwang

Frances Hwang, whose story “Blue Roses” appears this week in our pages, discusses her work with Deborah Treisman, the magazine’s fiction editor.

The main characters in your story “Blue Roses” are two women, Lin Fanghui and Wang Peisan, who have immigrated to the U.S. from Taiwan and raised their children here. They are both stubborn, difficult, demanding, sometimes irrational—and yet one senses that you have a genuine affection for both of them. Is that true?

Yes, it is. If Lin Fanghui and Wang Peisan didn’t have their quirks and flaws, they’d be less human and real to me. It’s hard for me to care about characters who don’t have any blind spots or shortcomings, because they can seem too perfect and bland. Lin Fanghui is not gentle or patient with others, but her hardness makes her a truthful, unsentimental person. In Wang Peisan’s defense, though she is haughty, self-absorbed, and demanding, she has a colorful personality and is quite seductive in her way, which is why Lin Fanghui becomes friends with her.

For a story in which much of the plot is sad—Wang Peisan loses her husband; Lin Fanghui feels hopelessly distant from her own children—“Blue Roses” is surprisingly funny.

For me, the humor of this story arises from the characters. There’s something funny to me about people being who they are and behaving the way that they do. They can’t escape themselves and betray their biases, fears, and obsessions with their every word and action. I’m not sure why this amuses me, but maybe it explains why I like Woody Allen’s films. If I felt less affection for my characters, they would probably not seem funny to me anymore. At the same time, seeing them in a humorous light helps me to avoid sentimentalizing them.

Where do your sympathies lie in the mother-daughter battle—with Lin Fanghui or with Eileen?

I sympathize with both characters actually. I can see why each is at fault, but at the same time I feel badly for both of them. No doubt the way Lin Fanghui responds seems unfair, out of proportion to what her daughter did. Yet Eileen is oblivious of her mother’s feelings, and her mother has to overreact in order to get her daughter’s attention. What triggers the fight is a small thing, but it’s the straw that broke the camel’s back. Lin Fanghui has been nursing a feeling of grievance and complaint toward all three of her children for a while now.

Several of the stories in your 2007 collection, “Transparency,” deal with intergenerational battles between Chinese immigrants and their Chinese-American children. Is this territory that you feel deeply drawn to?

I don’t consciously set out to write about this subject, but it seems as though I keep returning to it. Maybe it’s because intergenerational conflicts and cultural misunderstandings are never easily resolved, and it’s the fiction writer’s business to explore deep and abiding sources of conflict between people. When I write, I’m obviously drawing from my experiences and observations as a Chinese-American born of immigrant parents, but I can’t say that it’s this particular theme that motivates my writing. What compels me to write is a desire to illuminate moments of connection and disconnection between my characters. There’s so much mystery surrounding relationships, and I’m curious about why two people feel close in one moment and alienated in the next. Why do people become friends only to drift apart? Why do people fall in and out of love? One’s relationship with another person always seems to be in flux, and I’m probably more interested in capturing these shifts in mood and feeling than in writing about any particular theme or subject.

You’ve been compared to Jhumpa Lahiri and Lara Vapnyar, other writers who deal with the immigrant experience. How universal is that experience? How important are Chinese and Taiwanese culture to what you try to do in your stories?

Most people at some time in their lives have felt discomfort as a result of not belonging to a place or fitting in with a particular crowd. You would be a rare person, indeed, if you had never experienced being an outsider, if you had never been misunderstood or rejected because of who you were, how you looked, or what you said. I think that immigrants experience a similar feeling of dislocation and uncertainty as a result of not belonging to the mainstream of American society. They look, sound, or act different from the dominant culture, and they have to survive in an unfamiliar place among unfamiliar people. For this reason, I think the immigrant experience is one that everyone can relate to. I’ve always been intrigued by characters who feel awkward about their place in society, and it would be difficult for me to write about well-adjusted characters who don’t feel some conflict or tension with their environment and are immune to the judgment of others.

I’m interested in writing about Chinese culture insofar as it reveals something about who my characters are. My characters’ ethnicity is a crucial part of their identity, but I hope that I don’t ever reduce them to being only representatives of their culture. I realize that their ethnicity is probably the most obvious feature that distinguishes them in many readers’ minds, yet it isn’t the only thing that defines them. My characters often don’t think about being Chinese and take their culture and identity for granted. For these reasons, I’ve never been interested in giving readers a cultural-appreciation lesson. It would be presumptuous of me anyway, as I’m not an expert on Chinese or Taiwanese culture.

Deborah Treisman is The New Yorker ’s fiction editor and the host of its Fiction Podcast.